Country specialists

In early May, Narges Mohammadi, a distinguished human rights defender who is well-known within Iran and beyond, was arrested at her home. Security forces took her to Tehran's Evin Prison. Behind bars her health is rapidly deteriorating...

This blog is by Noa Kleinman who has recently retired as North America Country Coordinator, after 20 years. Indigenous women and girls in Canada are being murdered and disappeared at such a high rate that it amounts to a national human...

By Lucy Barnett, Country Coordinator – Bahrain and United Arab Emirates Friday marks the International Day of Families. The theme this year is ‘men in charge? Gender equality and children’s rights in contemporary families’ and it got...

María is tired of being forced to move from place to place. The 54-year-old adjusts her colourful headscarf and sighs heavily. She is one of Colombia’s six million forcibly displaced people. For years María called El Tamarindo home...

Written by Barbara Lodge, Country Coordinator for Turkey If Prime Minister Thatcher had had the thin skin of Turkey’s President Erdoğan, political cartoonist Gerald Scarfe would have been in and out of prison. Despite cartooning her as...

From Ian McGarr, our Country Coordinator on Colombia. As the decade long armed conflict has raged between government forces, paramilitary organisation and guerrilla groups in Colombia, civilians have borne the brunt. During this time...

Guest blogger Alex Jackson is our country expert on Eritrea and Somalia. The late nineties and early noughties were momentous years. I was living in Eritrea, and war with Ethiopia had consumed the country. Our passion for peace and...

The Indigenous people of the Chittagong Hills (CHT) are forbidden to talk to outsiders without security forces being present according to a new Bangladesh Government directive. ‘Outsiders’ includes people of their own country as well...

Cupid is especially busy on Valentine’s Day, but his methods leave much to chance. The mischievous love god blindfolds himself before firing his arrow through a new lover’s heart. An indiscriminate approach, but those arrows are pretty...

President Mugabe, his wife Grace and family are on holiday. As usual, they are spending time in Singapore in some luxury. Back home Zimbabweans are struggling to keep body and soul together . Businesses have closed at a rate of knots...

Who saw that coming? Last month, Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro appeared on TV, in carefully orchestrated, simultaneous broadcasts, to announce a prisoner swap. This was the start of a new era of rapprochement after more than...

'It’s not Europe. It’s a bit different… it’s a war here'. This is what a commander of the Aidar volunteer battalion told Amnesty earlier this year . War, or any full blown armed conflict as Ukraine is experiencing despite the recent...

On 7 August, Gao Zhisheng, a prominent human rights lawyer often referred to as the ‘conscience of China’ was released from prison. Released, but not yet free, his future remains uncertain: his political rights continue to be withheld...

For over 150 years between its independence from Spain and the mid-1980s, Bolivia was characterised by a history of coups, counter-coups and the occasional revolution. Since 1985, however, despite various outbreaks of social unrest...

With tensions high in Israel, this is a particularly difficult time to be a conscientious objector in a country where military service is compulsory for almost all of its young men and women. Omar Saad, a Druze viola player from...

Iran’s hardline judiciary is getting very good at silencing its critics. Over the last decade, but especially following the 2009 presidential election when the authorities tightened restrictions on free speech and access to information...

Ángel Amílcar Colón Quevedo's eight-year-old son was dying of cancer. Ángel is a black Honduran, a member of the downtrodden Garifuna community. In desperate hope of earning money for a cure for his child, Ángel tried to get to the...

Aspiring writers might dream of being an award-winning journalist with access to a wealth of captivating stories on crime, corruption and political intrigue. But what’s the reality in countries where freedom of speech is under serious...

ISIS, armed groups and militias, and Iraqi Government forces have committed war crimes and gross abuses of human rights in the conflict spreading across Iraq. Northern Iraq: Civilians in the Line of Fire is a new briefing by Amnesty...

On 11 June, Paraguay’s President Cartes signed into law an Expropriation Bill that returns more than 55 square miles of traditional land to the Sawhoyamaxa people – an area about the size of Cardiff. It’s hopefully the end of a...